MAY 08, 2019
Recent criticism of Joe Biden
for praising Dick Cheney as “a
decent man” and Mike Pence as “a decent guy” merely
scratches the surface of what’s wrong with the current frontrunner for the
Democratic presidential nomination. His compulsion to vouch for the decency of
Republican leaders — while calling Donald Trump an “aberration” — is consistent
with Biden’s political record. It sheds light on why he’s probably the worst
Democrat running for president.
After several decades of
cutting corporate-friendly deals with GOP legislators — often betraying the
interests of core Democratic constituencies in the process — Biden has a big
psychological and political stake in denying that the entire GOP agenda is
repugnant.
At the outset of his Senate
career, Biden lost no time appealing
to racism and running interference for
huge corporate interests. He went on to play a historic role in helping
to move
the Supreme Court rightward and serving such predatory businesses
as credit
card companies, big banks and hedge
funds.
Biden’s role as vice president
included a near-miss at cutting a deal with Republican leaders on Capitol Hill
to slash
Medicare and Social Security. While his record
on labor and trade has
been mediocre, Biden has enjoyed tight
mutual alliances with moneyed elites.
The nickname that corporate
media have bestowed on him, “Lunch Bucket Joe,” is wide of the mark. A
bull’s-eye is “Wall Street Joe.”
With avuncular style, Biden
has reflexively used pleasant rhetoric to grease the shaft given to millions of
vulnerable people, suffering the consequences of his conciliatory approach to
right-wing forces. Campaigning in Iowa a few days ago, Biden declared that
“the other side is not my enemy, it’s my opposition.” But his notable
kinship with Republican politicians has made him more of an enabler
than an opponent. Results have often been disastrous.
“In more than four decades of
public service, Biden has enthusiastically championed policies favored by
financial elites, forging alliances with Wall Street and the political right to
notch legislative victories that ran counter to the populist ideas that now
animate his party,” HuffPost senior reporter Zach Carter recounts.
Biden often teamed up with Senate Republicans to pass bills at the top of
corporate wish lists and to block measures for economic fairness.
In the mid-1970s, during his
first Senate term, Biden repeatedly clashed with Sen. Edward Kennedy, the chair
of the Judiciary Committee, who wanted to rein in runaway corporate
power. “Biden became an advocate for corporate interests that had
previously been associated with the Republican Party,” Carter reports. As he
gained seniority, Biden kept lining up with GOP senators against antitrust
legislation and for bills to give corporations more leverage over consumers and
workers. “By 1978, Americans for Democratic Action, the preeminent liberal
watchdog group of the time, gave Biden a
score of just 50, lower than its ratings for some Republicans.”
Opposing measures for racial
equity and economic justice, Biden’s operational bonds with GOP leaders
continued. Carter reports that “on domestic policy — from school
integration to tax policy — he was functionally allied with the Reagan
administration. He voted for a landmark Reagan tax bill that slashed the top
income tax rate from 70 percent to 50 percent and exempted many wealthy
families from the
estate tax on unearned inheritances, a measure that cost the federal
government an estimated $83
billion in annual revenue. He then called for a
spending freeze on Social Security in order to reduce the deficits
that tax law helped to create.”
Biden came through for
corporate power again in November 1993 when he joined with 26 other Democrats
and 34 Republicans to win Senate passage of NAFTA, the trade agreement strongly
opposed by labor unions and environmental groups. In mid-1996, when Congress
approved President Clinton’s “welfare reform” bill, Biden helped to vote the
draconian measure into law. It predictably had devastating effects on women and
children.
Throughout the 1990s — from
tax-rate changes that enriched the already-rich to deregulating banks with
repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act to loosening government curbs on credit
default swaps — Biden stood with the Senate’s Republicans and the most corporate-aligned
Democrats. Carter sums up: “Biden was a steadfast supporter of an economic
agenda that caused economic inequality to skyrocket during
the Clinton years. . . . Biden voted for all of it.”
Biden led the
successful push to pass the milestone 1994 crime bill, engaging
in racist tropes on
the Senate floor along the way. By then, he had become a powerful
lawmaker on criminal-justice issues.
In 1991, midway through his
eight years as chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Biden ran
the hearings for Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas that excluded
witnesses who were prepared to corroborate Anita Hill’s accusations of
sexual harassment. “Much of what Democrats blame Republicans for was
enabled, quite literally, by Biden: Justices whose confirmation to the Supreme
Court he rubber-stamped worked to disembowel affirmative action, collective
bargaining rights, reproductive rights, voting rights,” feminist author Rebecca
Traister writes.
Early in the new century,
Biden wielded another weighty gavel, with momentous results, as chair of the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In 2002, congressional Democrats were
closely divided on whether to greenlight the invasion of Iraq, while
Republicans overwhelmingly backed President George W. Bush’s mendacious case
for invading. Biden didn’t only vote for the Iraq invasion on the Senate floor
in October 2002. Months earlier, he methodically excluded
dissenting voices about the looming invasion at key hearings of the
Foreign Relations Committee.
While his impact on foreign
policy grew larger, Biden’s avid service to financial giants never flagged. One
of his top priorities was a crusade for legislation to undermine bankruptcy
protections. Biden was a mover and shaker behind the
landmark 2005 bankruptcy bill. Before President Bush signed it into law,
Biden was one of just 14 out of 45 Democratic senators to vote for the
legislation.
The bankruptcy law was a
monumental victory for credit-card firms — and a huge blow to consumers,
including students saddled with debt. As happened so often during Biden’s 36
years in the Senate, he eagerly aligned himself with Republicans and a minority
of Democrats to get the job done.
Now, running for president,
Biden has no use for candor about his actual record. Instead, he keeps
pretending that he has always been a champion of people he actually used his
power to grievously harm.
In ideology and record on
corporate power, the farthest from Biden among his competitors is Bernie
Sanders. No wonder Biden has gone out of his way to distance
himself from Sanders while voicing high
regard for the wealthy. (I was a Sanders delegate to the 2016 Democratic
National Convention and continue to actively support him.)
Biden’s ongoing zeal
to defend and accommodate Republicans in Congress is undiminished, as
though they should not be held accountable for President Trump even while they
aid and abet him. Days ago on the campaign trail — while referring to Trump —
Biden asserted:
“This is not the Republican Party.” And he spoke warmly of “my Republican
friends in the House and Senate.”
All in all, it’s preposterous
yet fitting for Joe Biden to claim that Republicans like Dick Cheney and Mike
Pence are “decent.” He’s not only defending them. He’s also defending himself.
